We learn many more things in this course than we usually give credit for.
I tried doing the Linux course on on edx.org at least twice, but I would fall over with boredom and never learn anything. There are still many aspects of Linux I do not understand, but it was only this course that got me started to use the basics of bash scripting, etc and I now feel confident to bring the environment up that I need.
I have owned the Python for Data Analysis book for numerous years now and have read it / worked through it on a couple of occasions. But give it a month or two and everything I read goes poof. I am now working through some of the material in the fastai library - maybe this is finally the time when I will learn how to use pandas. Who knows - I might even learn how to do this whole regression tree thing 
Maybe indeed we learn by doing and this course is unique in that it allows - encourages? - us to do things? Interesting, I have a young child and I see the education now moving in the direction of project based learning - of course the progress is slow and there is a lot of resistance. But hey - maybe for our kids the definition of learning will be closer to what it likely should be - hands on experimenting and internalizing knowledge as you go, where for me I still keep catching myself that I can do fairly advanced stuff and don’t perceive it as learning. I mean, if you don’t cram definitions and know every theoretical aspect of something before using it, then it is not really learning, right?